As a transfer to Cornell, I obviously feel like I just warped into another dimension without know what is really going on, and one of the ways I was introduced to Cornell’s new president, Martha Pollack, was through memes making fun of her and her administration on the Cornell: Any Person Any Meme Facebook page.

Here at the Rose House, we would actually get to meet the person I heard so much about, but was still shrouded by a veil of students’s stories describing her enthusiastic (or some other characteristic) teaching in some engineering class and memes making fun of her administration not trying to fix the mental health crisis or other issues that I can’t remember.

Of course, she seemed like a nice person, and I kind of felt bad for all the heat she was getting especially considering that she’s new and the problems she has to deal with (like the mental health crisis) are systemic problems that plague more than just Cornell. I felt like many of the students wanted to say things, but hesitated to since they didn’t want to be too pushy. Eventually, students did ask about the mental health crisis, but it seemed like Martha Pollack deflected the answer citing how technology is causing us to become more socially isolated and distressed (most notably with social media). While her point is valid and I agree that Cornell’s crisis is affected by so many external factors, such as our tech and the upbringing and academic culture that the students come from and grew up in, I felt like her answer was not the one the students wanted to hear.  I’m sure they wanted to hear more about their efforts to fight the problem, even if those efforts are not really effective in reality, rather than the “its a systemic problem” explanation. (I think she did mention the efforts we were taking to solve the problem too, but the societal cause part of the explanation stood out to me the most).

I grew up in a high school with an extremely toxic academic culture; I even described it as analogous to Chernobyl in terms of the toxicity. Because of this, I do realize that a lot of Cornell’s mental health issues are outside of Cornell’s realm of administration. They can’t control what a person believes, or what their family believes, or what “their society” expects them to do. But do I have a better solution? No, of course not. However, I need to mention that being in CALS, specifically in Plant Science, the toxicity that Cornell is known for is nowhere to be seen. I felt like the only toxic person there was me. And that drove the point home about toxic culture at Cornell: we brought (or didn’t bring) it here. The admin can’t do much preventing the issue unless they reject emotionally unstable students, but that would be wrong. They can only find ways to bandage up the already broken situation and prevent it from getting out of hand. While our president’ answer may not be adequate, if I were her, I wouldn’t know what else to say besides explaining all the various things we are already doing or trying to do.